coffee the fromsoiltosoul way

or

lessons on how NOT to make coffee, which lead to how to do it properly…

a beautiful cup of coffee that I made from scratch this morning, showing the harvest of beans that the coffee came from

Today I spent the morning making coffee from scratch. I had harvested and sun dried some coffee beans from my last home-sit and this morning I was ready and determined to drink some coffee from my own micro-harvest. This is quite a long and involved process, not unlike making chocolate from scratch. These two processes have many similarities, since they both depend on fermenting the seeds/beans, drying them, shelling the beans and then roasting them to develop more flavour.

So, here’s a picture of what coffee berries look like in the different stages of the process (I’ll try to include a photo of what they look like on the bush, too):

Clockwise from top left:

ripe coffee berries

whole dried ripe coffee berries (do NOT do this at home – details in text)

crushed dried berries

coffee beans with enclosing parchment

clean-ish coffee beans

roasted coffee beans

So, to make coffee from the coffee bean you basically harvest the ripe coffee berries, then dry them in full sunlight. I did this straight away, with the berries still whole, which was a bad idea. It turns out that the skin and pulp of the berries dry into a hard leather and make the extraction of the coffee beans quite a difficult process, the shelling of which took me the whole morning for less than half a pound of coffee. Not a very efficient way of making coffee, I guess… Another way of doing it is to break the berries when they are still whole and allowing them to dry broken up, thus making subsequent extraction slightly easier. You can find more information about coffee processing and about more sophisticated methods online, such as at the Paradise Coffee Roasters page.

During the drying stage the pulp also ferments, which gives the coffee beans a special aroma. Once fermented and dried you then shell the beans, which will show another thin layer of parchment coating each bean (of which there are usually 2 per berry), something like the almond or walnut skins you find after removing them from their larger outer fruits. These you must remove as well, which can be done by rubbing them against one another and blowing on them to winnow the chaff. Then you have some nice clean coffee beans to roast to your favourite darkness, ready to grind and brew. I ground the beans in a blender that a friend had just lent me in the morning, which didn’t give me the most even grind, but still, enough to keep experimenting with. I brought some water almost to the boil, until it started to send up tiny bubbles, poured the water into the cup of the blender to help wash out even the last little bit of coffee powder and let it stand until most of the bits settled in the bottom. Since I’ve only just moved in and I don’t even have a sieve or colander and didn’t want to use my socks as a filter, I had to then drink the coffee that way, spitting out the floating offenders, but it still made a nice cup of coffee that gave me a bit of a buzz and all!😀

So, knowing that very few of you live in the appropriate climate to even be able to grow the bushes that provide us with this amazing beverage, I still hope that you may be slightly illuminated regarding the process required for you to be able to enjoy your morning brew. For more information about and from the producers themselves I’d recommend you to read when coffee speaks, by Rachel Northrop.

Love the psot and the photos…. you are right, indeed> most of us have not a bush of coffee in sight> I look forward to receiving my first packet of “the barefoot coffee beans” together with the first installment of “barefoot soap maker” luxury soaps (they smell great, by the way)